12.1 Conceptual Overview of Menus and Dialogs

CLIM provides three powerful menu routines for allowing user to interact with an application through various kinds of menus and dialogs:

menu-choose
is a straightforward menu generator that provides a quick way to construct menus. You can call it with a list of menu items. (For a complete definition of menu items, see the function
menu-choose
.)

menu-choose-from-drawer
is a lower-level routine that allows the user much more control in specifying the appearance and layout of a menu. You can call it with a window and a drawing function. Use this function for more advanced, customized menus.

accepting-values
enables you to build a dialog. Unlike menus, you can specify several items that can be individually selected or modified within the dialog before dismissing it.To abort the dialog, press
control-z
. To exit the dialog, unless you are editing the field, press
control-]
. These key bindings can be changed by using
add-keystroke-to-command-table
and
remove-keystroke-from-command-table
.